


dive into illusions

by Corrosion



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Body Horror, Horror, M/M, Not In Chronological Order, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-10-26 00:37:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20733362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corrosion/pseuds/Corrosion
Summary: “Eh,” Bucky said, “you won’t have to worry about it. You’re human.”Sam was human. That was true, though just how human he was remained a question. He liked to think that he was mostly human. Probably human. Hopefully human. His wings rustled in sympathy and chirped at him.





	dive into illusions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sodium_amytal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodium_amytal/gifts).

> I apologize for any weird formatting. Ao3 sometimes puts unwanted spaces after italicized words when copy+pasting from Google Docs.

What could one do when faced with the end of the world? What was left to do? Even trained as he was for mass casualty incidents, Sam struggled to hold on to his hope for the future. His experience with triage had not prepared him for a situation where anything less than green was to be treated as black. In the beginning, before the morning he woke to half of his neighbors missing, he had done his best to recognize the signs and recommend that the affected person go to hospital. In the beginning, people had believed in a cure. 

* * *

  
  
  


“Eh,” Bucky said, “you won’t have to worry about it. You’re human.”

Sam was human. That was true. Just  _ how  _ human he was remained a question. He was mostly human. Probably human. Hopefully human. His wings rustled in sympathy and chirped at him. 

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Sam stopped walking and rubbed at his eyes with a hand in an attempt to remove whatever had just flown into his eyes. When he found no obvious culprit, he shielded his eyes and looked to the clouded evening sky. “That looks like rain, doesn’t it? I think I got a drop in my eye.”

“It’s not dangerous,” Bucky said. He appeared to consider this for a moment, tilting his head to one side. “Not this time, at least.”

“Yeah, see, I don’t exactly trust your definition of ‘dangerous.” Sam stopped gazing at the sky and sprinted his way over the gravel of the trail to catch up to Bucky. “Some of us are squishy humans who would appreciate  _ not  _ being disappeared by whatever eldritch power started this whole mess.”

Bucky picked up his own pace as Sam neared, always keeping a good two yards ahead. “...How many times do I have to tell you that I’m human?” 

“The most important bit was the “squishy” part, not the “human” part,” Sam said, as if he were not the person who used to be a pararescue airman and so was not fragile relative to the rest of humanity. Well, that was true if he and Bucky weren’t the only humans left, a creeping fear he confronted every time it dared to appear in his conscious. He was of the opinion that should he try to ignore that dread, hide from it, he would eventually succumb to the same nihilism that had caused the situation in the city. While he had been able to flee from the city, he couldn’t run away from his own mind.

“There’s a gas station at the end of this trail.” As Bucky continued to jog, the space where his left arm dwelled warped; whether or not that discomforted him Sam couldn’t have known, as Bucky showed no outward signs of noticing. 

“One that still has a roof, or…? Because the last town we went through didn’t have any whole buildings.” If Sam found incomplete buildings in otherwise pristine condition disconcerting, that was, as far as he was concerned, his right as a human being. 

The only answer Bucky provided was silence and the crunching of gravel under his boots.

Sam sighed. He tried, but there was no use in trying if Bucky wasn’t willing to tell him anything. What else was there to do? Not much, aside from look for other survivors and maintain their own supplies.

The gravel path eventually gave way to pavement, though Sam had to avoid large cracks and the occasional pothole. The vegetation wasn’t dense and the trees’ roots had yet to find their way into the pavement, so he could only hope that the damage had been caused by normal wear and tear and not by some preternatural force. Bucky came to an abrupt halt at the end of the path, where it merged with the sidewalk surrounding a gas station parking lot, and held out his visible arm. Sam got the hint and slowed down before he would have collided with Bucky.

Bucky gestured at the worn but probably structurally sound gas station. “This enough roof for you?” Without waiting for an answer, he sauntered over to the entrance of the building and pushed open the door. The bells tied to the door handle didn’t jingle. 

“It’ll do,” Sam said, and followed Bucky’s lead, though with a bit more hesitation. There were no cars in the parking lot, though there were bicycles fused to the bike rack, tires gradually turning to cement. He made certain to stay well away from them; however much he knew that the weirdness couldn’t spread like a disease, he was still slightly suspicious of visibly warped objects. He wasn’t ashamed to say that such things were creepy as hell. Eventually, with the admonishment and encouragement of enough rain to wet his hair, he entered the gas station.

The station had already been looted, shelves in disarray and postcards spilled on the ground proclaiming that the state of Virginia’s natural beauty was unrivaled — they had forests, lakes, fun, and rivers. Sam immediately looked away from the postcards, as he was absolutely certain that “fun”  _ was not supposed to be there.  _ “Fun” was not a word that Sam trusted any more; whatever sentient or non-sentient being that haunted this world had apparently only had access to humanity by way of watching horror movies, and one did not trust the word “fun” when one was living in a non-human’s (non-humans’?) honest try at the horror genre. 

Sam picked a wall away from the postcards, took off his backpack, and sat down. The comforting background noise of a gentle rainstorm did nothing to assuage Sam’s apprehension over Bucky and Bucky’s reason for protecting him. Worrying about Bucky’s motivations was easier than worrying about when the rain would stop coming down in an unorganized mass, when it would try to communicate with them. He wasn’t sure if all rain was semi-sentient, and he didn’t want to find out. The sky had opened its maw on them once before.

Bucky rolled a plastic fork under a bootheel, and, when Sam turned to him, he said, “You wanted to know why I helped you.” 

“What, it wasn’t out of the goodness of your own heart?” Sam rather doubted that, but altruism wasn’t the least common motivation. No need to dismiss it entirely. 

“Close.” 

“But no cigar?”

Bucky slumped onto the floor, his back to a solid wall and his gaze to just above Sam’s head. “Closer than you— closer than I’m comfortable with.” 

They let the comforting noise of raindrops on the roof fill the silence while Sam thought. Bucky’s actions were a riddle (wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma), and, while Sam kept a stack of half-finished crosswords and sudoku like anyone else, he wasn’t overly fond of having to solve puzzles when the person presenting them to him didn’t want them solved. Still, Sam said, “Why? You know where we’re going; I’m just tagging along for the ride.”

“How many good people do you know?” 

Sam affixed Bucky with a glare, but Bucky was seeing something Sam couldn’t (wouldn’t). “Not a single person who’s gone deserved it.” Of that, he was certain; some people deserved to be behind bars, but he had devoted his military career to saving people. After death, there was nothing to be done. 

“Answer the question,” Bucky said, his voice light. His posture could have fooled Sam into thinking he was relaxed. “How many good people do you know?”

Sam nearly snapped back by saying Riley’s name, but he didn’t want to have that conversation with Bucky, not when Bucky was asking questions that had no good answer. In the end, he settled on what he actually believed. “There are people who—,” he paused, as Bucky didn’t need to be reminded that people were so often cruel, and restarted, “I think that everyone has the potential to do good, but people have their own problems. You can’t save someone else from drowning if you can’t even keep your own head above the water.” 

“You’re stuck with me because I’m not one of them.” 

“A good man?” Or someone who tried to save another while desperately hacking water form his own lungs? 

Bucky shook his head and snorted. “No. I knew one once. Followed him until the end of the line.” (And at that station, lost him.)

Sam ran his fingers through his hair, rested his forehead in his hand, and said, “Is he still around?” Obviously not, but Sam had meant in the general sense of “alive” and, moreover, hoped that, whatever the answer ended up being, it would be in the general sense. 

“He died,” Bucky said, and closed his eyes for a moment, though the rest of his face betrayed no emotion.

Well, fuck. That wasn’t where Sam meant to lead the conversation, but conversations were two-sided things. He wasn’t the only participant. He should have guessed from the way that Bucky has said “knew,” but his mind had been otherwise occupied. 

Before Sam could say anything, Bucky said, “He’s probably alive by now.” In this world of theirs, Sam couldn’t be too sure whether “by now” meant resurrection or reincarnation or yet another state of existence. 

“Do you want to find him?” If Riley were alive, that was what Sam would want to do. 

“No,” Bucky said, and that was that. 

* * *

  
  


Birds perched on wrought iron chairs warbled the confusing, entrancing static of a radio set just outside broadcasting range. Sam waved them off and reclined back on the old cafe’s bench. If he concentrated, he’d be able to understand the words of their speech but not the meaning. That was okay. As far as he could figure, most of the songbirds weren’t saying anything more important now than they did before the disaster. There was nothing to fear from the chirps, save for what their absence heralded. 

Silence was golden, golden as the eyes that stared back when Sam lingered just a little bit too long on the spaces between things. He and Bucky had fought those things before, and neither one of them wanted to do so ever again, so, of course, the birds stopped singing for a month after their first encounter. The beings with the golden eyes would be easier for Sam to deal with if he could recognize what they had been before, if they had been anything at all. Eventually, he accepted that the creatures were what could have been between the spaces, had a statue moved just a bit to the right and him to the left. 

The once-human Sam encountered early on in his journey had hissed at him through the mouth that separated their top half from their hands and arms. He couldn’t recall exactly what he’d been told, yet he couldn’t forget the encounter. In his memories, the birds drowned out any words that may have passed between him and the once-human. It hadn’t been that way in reality. 

Without noticing it, a person’s memories could be easily modified when new information came to light; Sam knew that, but such a specific deviation in his memories from what he knew had to have happened disquieted him. Once he realized the discrepancy, he began writing down any unusual events (what counted as unusual now?) in the hopes of ferreting out the reason behind his altered memories. His first journal had undergone many revisions, the words taken to floating on topic of one another, though unraveling like film at the touch. There, his reality was overlaid with the reality of another. 

None of his memories concerning Bucky ever ended up in such a state. Sam held no illusions that they were unaltered. 

It was safe, here amongst the birds, to reminisce. 


End file.
